One

And your skin, … your skin and bones

Turn into something beautiful

And you know, … I'd bleed myself dry

For you, I'd bleed myself dry

-Coldplay, “Yellow”

Two

The drive to the pizza shop in Hastings brought me beside the “mental compound”, as the locals called it. I even used to call it that at one point; the twenty-odd acres of land along State Route 22 was a common destination for pizza orders at my boss’s first location he owned, mostly for nurses during their lunch break. As I traveled to it more often, I slowly started to learn more about the history of this town, now dwindling in memory, alongside the rest of the nation’s history, buried for reasons I now understand, but for your sake, I will not fully tell.

It was a combination of buildings; first, the adult hospice care center. Dementia patients, depressed individuals, and terminally ill were held alongside the psychological ward, an old prison converted for comfort and sanitation. Both of those were next to the old slaughterhouse; these were everywhere in the 1920’s, brought on by the nation’s accelerated rise to fascistic nationalism at the height of the Paris Invasion. After a number of years of mass censorship of literature, technological progress, and the revision of the government, the new Twin Crown Monarchy said, ‘enough was enough’ and closed down what they called the lethal chambers. They now stand like abandoned highways; scars of the past evident, reclaimed by nature, decadent, yet ever-present.

All of this was on my mind when I began thinking about the King. Not the current king, not the first king of America; Him. A forgotten masterpiece, far too haunting to comprehend, its story and truth revealing far too much about our societies, our lives; meaningless against the blackened stars above.

When the small yellow town of Hastings came into view, I was arrested with the notion to throw myself off the road and into the treeline, leaving the rest to Fortuna. As if I was shaking myself awake in the night at the wheel, I corrected my wheel and my tire slipped off the road for a moment, but I kept my course. Heart pounding in my head, I kept both hands on the wheel and descended into the town.

I parked towards the back of the building at 10:21. About five minutes later than I would normally want to be. The pizza shop was built into an old bank, with my boss's office set up in the massive safe which still remained inside, the only proof this place was a bank at all. I grabbed my keys and unlocked the front door, racing to the security panel next to the register to turn off the minute-long trip alarm.

I began racing through the building to turn on the lights, oven, fans, and fryer, grabbing the buckets of sauce and the serving spoons we use with it, pulling the fresh wings out of the fridge, and going about the normal details it takes to open the store that are now meaningless to me. At around 10:32, the phone rang; caller ID revealed it to be my boss. As I picked up to answer it, Rain stepped through the front door and made his way back to where I was, clocking in, humming “The Sign” by Ace of Base, as I was speaking to my boss.

“Hey Phil,” I said through the receiver.

“Hey, thanks for coming in early again,” he said, with the familiar hum of his truck in the background. “Everything okay up there so far?”

“Yep, Rain just came in, no orders coming through yet. Just the one for noon it looks like?”

“Yeah, I think so. Sounds about right. Should be an easy day. Can you pull like two boxes of dough for tomorrow from the freezer?”

“I'll get on it yeah,” I confirmed. I'd have done it earlier if I knew what needed to be pulled, but then again I barely got here on time to begin with.

“Alright,” he said, getting ready to hang up. “Tell Rain I said hi.”

Rain does not like our boss, so I would not say hi. I was also not fond of my boss for the nights he'd call me into work during my student teaching semester, when work was piling up and I knew there were other people who could take the shift, but that's what happens when you're the right-hand person.

“See you,” I replied, putting the phone on the receiver again. Not a second before I could leave, the phone began ringing again. I picked up with the normal greeting; “Hello this is Severin’s in Hastings, what can I do for you?”

“Have you seen it?”

A chill shot through me. That's what Aaron asked before I left for work. The notification remained unanswered.

“Aaron?” I asked through the receiver, before hearing the click on the other end.

It's strange to think about now, but by the time I hung up the phone with my boss, I had nearly forgotten about the book. Its reminder returned me to the crusty, jaundiced pages that lay beneath my pillow at home.

“You okay?” I heard a voice next to me ask. Rain’s voice, soft from youth but with a deep, practiced tone.

I looked at him, the lie quickly hiding my anxiety. “Yeah, no one was on the other end. I thought it might be a friend though.”

“Oh,” Rain said. “Okay. You just look a little pale is all.”

Was I pale?

“I did not get a lot of sleep last night,” I admitted. “Almost ran off the road on the way here.”

“Oh jeez,” Rain replied, recoiling a little. “Don't do that, also don't rush yourself too much.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I replied sarcastically. We were both cut from the same cloth; comradery and morale ran easy for us. My words were affection in our shared tongue. How much I miss talking to someone so young and innocent.

Remembering the last thing I usually try to do before a shift gets started, I turned on the TV to the local news, once again frozen in my tracks.

It was a report about a gruesome killing that took place in a nearby city that night; an entire queer night club was attacked by an unconfirmed individual. The closed captions took their time to load, but between the flashes of police tape and a woman with makeup streaming down her face, and the subtitles as they quickly stuttered along the bottom of the screen only to pause and load, gave me a strange sensation when finalized upon a work of graffiti that was painted on the wall; sprawling, wilting, and, above all else, yellow.

The phone rang once again. I recognized the number. I pulled the receiver to my head like a loaded gun.

“Hello?” my voice whispered through.

“Have you seen it?”

A warm sensation broke across my face, and for a moment, I stared him in the face.

“Hello? Is this Severin’s?” the voice inquired.

Ripped back to consciousness, I stuttered through the phone. “Uh, yeah, this is Severin’s. How can I help you?”

“Oh, I was just wondering if you were open,” the voice said, tone and pitch completely changed.

It wasn't an easy day. It was damn near the hardest day I've ever had. It seemed the entire town and each of the neighboring towns wanted a plain piece of pizza with extra cheddar cheese. Our delivery guy Kyle came in an hour late, and when I asked about it, he simply said he was helping exterminate ground hornets outside of his home. By then he had five deliveries ready to go, growing cold in the delivery bags. When the backup shift came in around two in the afternoon, chaos and cheese and boxes were scattered in a desperate attempt to keep it all together. Worst of all, we were out of most of our dough.

A little bit after the afternoon shift came in, the phone began ringing again. Expecting the same question that began rattling around inside my brain, my voice exhaled, erratic and stressed.

“Hey, what's going on down there?” Phil’s voice came through the clamor of the chattering crowd, gathering beneath the television, which had been displaying the yellow symbol on live air for about an hour now.

“It's bad,” I admitted. “You see the numbers?”

Phil has access to live, updated reports on the store's earnings, percentage labor, and incoming orders.

“Yeah I saw the earnings, who's been throwing things around? Who's shouting? Who hasn't seen it?”

Stammering, struggling to speak, and confused about the entire phrase, I cleared my throat and replied, “No one’s been screaming. Not from what I can tell. We're just getting really hammered and are out of extra large and large dough balls. We've been using Sicilian pizza doughs to get by.”

“Well,” Phil responded, back to relatively normal behavior, “keep going with it. Get as many orders as you can. Use the frozen dough if you have to. And if anyone's causing trouble, let me know who it is. I'll check the cameras later to see what's been going on.”

“What do you want me to do with all the incoming orders?” I asked, half incredulous, half desperate for some kind of guidance.

“Follow them,” I heard a voice breathe into my ear. I couldn't tell if it was from the phone or from inside my head. When the other end clicked off, I slammed the phone onto the receiver and slammed my hand into the near wall.

“Jesus,” Rain exclaimed, across from the register to me. “Who was that?”

“It was Phil,” I grumbled. “What's up?”

“I need you to ring up my lunch order,” he replied, lifting his card lightly. Phil wouldn't let us do our own order payments for paranoia of theft. Taking a moment to look at the long list of orders that still needed to be made, and as if to highlight my own lack of break through this entire day, I complied.

“You look awful, are you sure you're okay?” Rain asked, handing me his card. How was he untouched by all of this?

“Probably not,” I admitted. I was feeling stressed, strained, and covered in pizza sauce. “Besides the hell we're going through, I don't feel any off.”

Rain nodded, eyeing me. I couldn't tell if he knew I was lying. I didn't want to be seen anymore.

“If you need a break, just let us know,” he replied.

I looked at the clock once more, avoiding eye contact, trying to dodge any amount of feeling of remote kindness from someone I considered a distant brother. Ten after two. I handed Rain’s card back.

“Back to it,” I raised my voice while wiping my eyes, crossing the kitchen. “No time for phones,” I called to two of the high school girls who just came in for their shifts, “we got orders to handle.”

At some point I lost my ability to read orders. The numbers on the clock became fluid, like one you'd find in a Dali painting.

I checked the time. I couldn't read it. I chuckled in spite of myself. A voice on the phone asked me the question again. I hung up.

At some point I lost the ability to tell time. The letters on our orders jumbled and merged together, like a foreign language I couldn't recognize.

I checked the new order that came through. I couldn't read it. I laughed in spite of myself. A voice from the lobby asked me the question again. I asked them to clarify what order they were picking up.

At some point I lost the ability to hear anything. The words from the mouths of my coworkers were twisting out of themselves, wilting on the air as the noise traveled to my ears, like static through a radio.

I asked the man with the yellow skin what he wanted from me. I couldn't hear him. I shrieked in spite of myself. I sobbed in spite of myself. I prayed in spite of my soul.

I checked the time. There was a yellow four on the display, over three yellow flashing caller ID buttons from the customer system saying that phones were not being answered.

I ran from the store out the back, got in my car, shut the door, and punched the center console. I screamed, exhausted from the pain, the poison in my veins. I sobbed, turning the key over. I prayed I would make it home safely.

Using what extra tip money I had from a different day's work, I bought a bottle of wine and settled myself down on the living room couch behind Gavin, who was busy playing something on an old console. It didn't matter which one to me; what mattered was that I wasn't alone as I uncorked the bottle and began to drink. There was no California Red, no Pinot Noir, no sake. The only wine which lined the shelves was vin jaune; yellow French wine. It was almost a cruel joke to be staring down this bottle, but I put it to my mouth; the curved glass allowed the bone-dry liquid into my body. I had tasted wine before, but I wasn't ready for my wine to be spicy. Sputtering, coughing, I pushed my attention away from the bottle; Gavin had paused and turned to face me.

“Rough day?” he asked.

“You wouldn't believe it if I told you,” I muttered numbly.

Gavin nodded. “Fair enough.” The fact he checked in on me was enough for now. He turned back around and began playing his game again.

“Has the world always felt this awful?” I asked, but my question reached beyond Gavin.

“Pretty much,” Gavin confirmed, not taking his eyes off the television screen. “Although you only realize it after being in it long enough.”

“What are we ever supposed to do about it?” I asked in response, begging for some form of God that I was taught to believe in to answer me.

“Do what you gotta do,” only Gavin replied. “I don't think too hard about it. Keep my head down, do what I can, enjoy what I can. Don't sweat the small stuff, y'know?”

How could I ever live with myself, knowing that the world I've lived in for so long, has been rotting since before I was alive?

“What game are you playing, by the way?” I asked, out of curiosity.

Gavin turned around to wink at me. “King's Field.”

I had never gotten blackout drunk before that night. Nor would it be the last time I would. Only vague flashes of memory exist from that night; between trying desperately to look online for more about the book, to laughing at a random movie Gavin put on, to having the paranoid sensation of something watching me. Losing my consciousness was something that never happened; especially not acting and moving and having conversations where I could not remember their subjects or direction. I may have driven to get more of that wine; the only indication of that was when I woke up in the living room, sun high, with four empty bottles scattered at my feet, mouth grainy like a desert, and a half-empty bottle in my right hand. My shirt was stained and smelled of something awful; probably vomit, to guess by the sickly yellow tone of it.

I reached for my phone, miraculously plugged into the wall, to see if any of my normal cognition had returned. I had about five missed calls from my boss, two from my mom, one from Rain, and thirty seven text notifications.

It had been about five days since I blacked out.

I jolted up from the couch, turning to observe my surroundings. Numerous bottles of vin jaune were scattered across the floor, some broken in shards of glass scattered in a few feet’s diameter.

My blood, pulse, consciousness froze when I realized that Gavin was laying next to one of the shattered bottles, limp, yellow eye staring up at me.

Terror seized me as I looked around the kitchen, seeing a commotion play out. Signs of a struggle. Blood leading upstairs. Taking the steps up like frenzied molasses, I turned into my room.

Scattered across the floor was the mountain of my books, clothes, shelves, and trading cards. There was no rhyme or reason to the chaos; there was no meaning to the structure. The only notable sign of order was the book, on top of the bookshelf, standing up straight over all of it.

I struggled to open my phone. I had to call authorities. Paramedics. Police. Someone.

One notification stood out to me.

Aaron > The day has come.

--

Hi again ^^'

I was able to get this second part up pretty quickly, but I can't promise the same kind of pace for the last part lol. Many thanks to everyone who commented and encouraged on the first post; I'll do my best to make sure the last one is a banger.

-Me :3